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idiotgirl

11:38 am on Aug 17, 2001 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



I see I have some HEAD requests in my logfiles for one of my domains. Never noticed any before, but never paid that much attention to it, either. Reverse IP'd a couple and they were image spiders (gifwizard & inktomi)- but some others reverse IP'd to China (gee, who's surprised?)

Have I slept through a few years of HEAD requests littering my logfiles? They look like:

198.139.155.32 - - [17/Aug/2001:05:16:17 -0500] "HEAD /sports/news.shtml HTTP/1.1" 200 0

Also had BUNCHES of:
63.166.100.25 - - [13/Aug/2001:22:46:53 -0500] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 27416

(which looks like the prerequisite of a half-hearted hack, from what I've read)

Am I being paranoid? Dim? I can see the image spider thing, but this just looks different than what I'm used to seeing.

Idiotgirl

volatilegx

3:41 pm on Aug 17, 2001 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



A HEAD request just requests the headers of a file, including the date the file was last modified, among others. Bots do head requests for a number of reasons, but among the most popular are:

* they take less bandwidth than a GET request
* it's an easy way to check the last modified date of a file if you need to keep something up to date
* many times used to "pre-spider" a site to make sure that the page you submitted exists before it's scheduled for retrieval.